Chironomid research through pandemics, recent advances

After 5 blank years since the last symposium and 3 years of COVID-19 pandemics, the 21st International Symposium on Chironomidae (ISC2022) was held for the first time online from the 4th to the 7th of July, 2022. The symposium gathered a total of 45 presentations organized around the major topics of ecology, taxonomy, genomics, phylogeny, and physiology. We introduce here a general overview of the studies presented during the symposium, together with the few papers published in the present proceedings special issue.